Green Spring Gardens in Alexandria, Virginia, is a favorite place for photography for Cindy Dyer, who specializes in botanical subjects, and it was there that two years ago she was featured in an exhibition of 88 of her photos. A visitor to that exhibit, who happened to be the wife of an art director for the U.S. Postal Service, saw her work and mentioned Cindy to her husband, who happened to be looking for specific subject images to license for stamps. Cindy submitted 20 photographs of ferns, from which the Postal Service selected five for First Class Forever Stamps, which are currently available for purchase online at the USPS website.

When Nathan Crowder shows his work at the Tennessee Art League’s monthly gallery show in downtown Nashville, he favors the maximum effect of displaying a few large images rather than, say, ten 8x10s. Not too long ago, this photo got an especially strong, emotional, and gratifying reaction.

The camera Michael carries might be his Leica M6, loaded with either Ilford XP-2 or Kodak BW400CN chromogenic film and fitted with either a 35mm f/2 or 50mm f/2 Summicron lens; or his Fuji X10 point-and-shoot with its zoom lens set for the equivalent of 50mm; or his Nikon D200 or D700 with the manual 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor lens he got with his F3 back when he was in college.

He didn’t set out to capture an icon in an image that’s instantly classic, but that’s pretty much what happened. “It was a walkabout on a foggy day,” Chris Ford says. “I sometimes like to shoot on foggy days in Manhattan, and I live on the Lower East Side, so getting down to the Brooklyn Bridge was relatively easy.”

“I got to Los Angeles four days before the ’84 Olympic games began, and at the gymnastics pavilion saw Glenn Sundby, the founder and publisher of International Gymnast magazine. I knew Glenn, and he’d been hired as venue chief for photographers. Not knowing he’d get that job, two years earlier he’d bought an arena ticket and had a front row center seat for the events. He gave me that ticket in return for use in his magazine of any photographs USA Gymnastics didn’t choose.

Currently a lecturer, teacher, and writer, Sam Abell’s celebrated career includes positions as a contract and staff photographer and photographer-in-residence at National Geographic magazine. This 1959 photo of his father at the Painesville, Ohio, train station is the homepage image of his website, samabell-thephotographiclife.com.

Chances are you won’t be photographing in the negative numbers of extreme cold that Layne Kennedy often encounters—we’re talking -15 to -30 degrees Fahrenheit—but his experience with and guidelines for cold-weather shooting can provide you with a considerable degree of comfort no matter what the temperature.

Rick Sammon’s first comment when I asked about this picture was, “The best time to take a night picture is not at night.” Twilight is a better choice, and that’s when this image was made in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which was the first stop for Rick and his wife, Susan, on their six-day tour last April of selected attractions along Route 66.

Arthur Meyerson is an award-winning commercial, editorial, and fine art photographer celebrated for his control of composition and command of light and color. In 2012 he published The Color of Light, a collection of iconic, classic images that included this photograph.